Robot Games

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Robot Games fascinate and develop

It is a challenge to get a wheel based car/robot/device to move, climb, sound, light and do artistic stuff at a precise position on a track. As an example of such a track see the Robocub track in 2008: www.dtu.dk

Competing for winning in such a challenging game demands on a lot of competences just to be in the game, not to say what it takes to win. It combines the mechanics, the electronics and the software into a new art which creates a lot of new innovations. Later we will see these innovations in daily life, in games, in medico areas, as well as energy improvements.

GamesOnTrack benefits from many of these innovations. And we help creating new ones. However, our main objective is to make them easy to use and bring them into user environment for the 10s of millions of young people who spend a lot of time each day playing computer games.

Ideally we hope to bring the fun of the "robot" into this gaming community thereby enabling much more active gaming and physical understanding and to get more teams across interested in the real world challenges.

The Technical Challenge

Three students made a project trying to get two Lego Robots to play a hunting game against each other inside a frame. Please study the link to the project by Kristan Andersen, Simon Lykke, Jacob Styrup Bang: esea-legolab.blogspot.com

It is a lot about sensors, it is a lot about software and tools for manipulating the input in due time and precise order, and it is a lot about designing for robustness. Physical devices never act exactly as you would assume. That only happens in pure software. The team succeeded creating a new sensor for the catching game making the two robots act against each other using the Lego NXT (R) tools. The two robots played like intelligent agents against each other without a 3rd computer acting as the controller.

Of course, today it is too much of a complexity to get you and me to understand the algoritmic details and sit down program the positions and adjustments to catch up for the normal invariance in physical components like wheels, gear, motors and sensors. We are not there yet where tools for that purpose become ordinary off-the-shelf gear for any 12 year old gamer. However, the development of projects like this will create these tools and games one day, and the day is not far away.

Imagine the GPS was inside your house, imagine it had a precision of 10 mm. And continue to think of all your movements, your electronics, your playing devices, your games, your facilities and yourself being adopted and location aware.